I
With Terry Wickett gone, Martin returned to phage. He made a false start
and did the worst work of his life. He had lost his fierce serenity. He
was too conscious of the ordeal of a professional social life, and he
could never understand that esoteric phenomenon, the dinner-party--the
painful entertainment of people whom one neither likes nor finds
interesting.
So long as he had had a refuge in talking to Terry, he had not been too
irritated by well-dressed nonentities, and for a time he had enjoyed the
dramatic game of making Nice People accept him. Now he was disturbed by
reason.
Clif Clawson showed him how tangled his life had grown.
When he had first come to New York, Martin had looked for Clif, whose
boisterousness had been his comfort among Angus Duers and Irving
Watterses in medical school. Clif was not to be found, neither at the
motor agency for which he had once worked nor elsewhere on Automobile
Row. For fourteen years Martin had not seen him.
Then to his laboratory at McGurk was brought a black-and-red card:
ClifORD L. CLAWSON
(Clif)
Top Notch Guaranteed Oil Investments
Higham Block
Butte
“Clif! Good old Clif! The best friend a man ever had! That time he lent
me the money to get to Leora! Old Clif! By golly I need somebody like
him, with Terry out of it and all these tea-hounds around me!” exulted
Martin.
He dashed out and stopped abruptly, staring at a man who was, not
softly, remarking to the girl reception-clerk:
“Well, sister, you scientific birds certainly do lay on the agony! Never
struck a sweller layout than you got here, except in crook
investment-offices--and I’ve never seen a nicer cutie than you anywhere.
How ’bout lil dinner one of these beauteous evenings? I expect I’ll
parley-vous with thou full often now-- I’m a great friend of Doc
Arrowsmith. Fact I’m a doc myself--honest--real sawbones--went to medic
school and everything. Ah! _Here’s_ the boy!”
Martin had not allowed for the changes of fourteen years. He was
dismayed.
Clif Clawson, at forty, was gross. His face was sweaty, and puffy with
pale flesh; his voice was raw; he fancied checked Norfolk jackets, tight
across his swollen shoulders and his beefy hips.
He bellowed, while he belabored Martin’s back:
“Well, well, well, well, well, well! Old Mart! Why, you old son of a
gun! Why, you old son of a gun! Why, you damn’ old chicken-thief! Say,
you skinny little runt, I’m a son of a gun if you look one day older’n
when I saw you last in Zenith!”
Martin was aware of the bright leering of the once humble
reception-clerk. He said, “Well, gosh, it certainly is good to see you,”
and hastened to get Clif into the privacy of his office.
“You look fine,” he lied, when they were safe. “What you been doing with
yourself? Leora and I did our best to look you up, when we first came to
New York. Uh-- Do you know about, uh, about her?”
“Yuh, I read about her passing away. Fierce luck. And about your swell
work in the West Indies--where was it? I guess you’re a great man
now--famous plague-chaser and all that stuff, and world-renowned
skee-entist. I don’t suppose you remember your old friends now.”
“Oh, don’t be a chump! It’s--it’s--it’s fine to see you.”
“Well, I’m glad to observe you haven’t got the _capitus enlargatus_,
Mart. Golly, I says to meself says I, if I blew in and old Mart
high-hatted me, I’d just about come nigh unto letting him hear the
straight truth, after all the compliments he’s been getting from the
sassiety dames. I’m glad you’ve kept your head. I thought about writing
you from Butte--been selling some bum oil-stock there and kind of got
out quick to save the inspectors the trouble of looking over my books.
‘Well,’ I thought, ‘I’ll just sit down and write the whey-faced runt a
letter, and make him feel good by telling him how tickled I am over his
nice work.’ But you know how it is--time kind of slips by. Well, this is
excellentus! We’ll have a chance to see a whole lot of each other now.
I’m going in with a fellow on an investment stunt here in New York.
Great pickings, old kid! I’ll take you out and show you how to order a
real feed, one of these days. Well, tell me what you been doing since
you got back from the West Indies. I suppose you’re laying your plans to
try and get in as the boss or president or whatever they call it of this
gecelebrated Institute.”
“No-- I, uh, well, I shouldn’t much care to be Director. I prefer
sticking to my lab. I-- Perhaps you’d like to hear about my work on
phage.”
Rejoicing to discover something of which he could talk, Martin sketched
his experiments.
Clif spanked his forehead with a spongy hand, and shouted:
“Wait! Say, I’ve got an idea--and you can come right in on it. As I
apperceive it, the dear old Gen. Public is just beginning to hear about
this bac--what is it?--bacteriophage junk. Look here! Remember that old
scoundrel Benoni Carr, that I introduced as a great pharmacologist at
the medical banquet? Had din-din with him last eventide. He’s running a
sanitarium out on Long Island--slick idea, too--practically he’s a
bootlegger; gets a lot of high-rollers out there and let’s ’em have all
the hooch they want, on prescriptions, absolutely legal and water-tight!
The parties they throw at that joint, dames and everything! Believe me,
Uncle Clif is sore stricken with tootelus bootelus and is going to the
Carr Sanitarium for what ails him! But now look: Suppose we got him or
somebody to rig up a new kind of cure--call it phageotherapy--oh, it
takes Uncle Clif to invent the names that claw in the bounteous dollars!
Patients sit in a steam cabinet and eat tablets made of phage, with just
a little strychnin to jazz up their hearts! Bran-new! Million in it!
What-cha-think?”
Martin was almost feeble. “No, I’m afraid I’m against it.”
“Why?”
“Well, I-- Honestly, Clif, if you don’t understand it, I don’t know how
I can explain the scientific attitude to you. You know--that’s what
Gottlieb used to call it--scientific attitude. And as I’m a
scientist--least I hope I am-- I couldn’t-- Well, to be associated with
a thing like that--”
“But, you poor louse, don’t you suppose I understand the scientific
attitude? Gosh, I’ve seen a dissecting-room myself! Why, you poor crab,
of course I wouldn’t expect you to have your name associated with it!
You’d keep in the background and slip us all the dope, and get a lot of
publicity for phage in general so the Dee-ah People would fall easier,
and we’d pull all the strong-arm work.”
“But-- I hope you’re joking, Clif. If you weren’t joking, I’d tell you
that if anybody tried to pull a thing like that, I’d expose ’em and get
’em sent to jail, no matter who they were!”
“Well, gosh, if you feel that way about it--!”
Clif was peering over the fatty pads beneath his eyes. He sounded
doubtful:
“I suppose you have the right to keep other guys from grabbing your own
stuff. Well, all right, Mart. Got to be teloddeling. Tell you what you
_might_ do, though, if that don’t hurt your tender conscience, too: you
might invite old Clif up t’ the house for dinner, to meet the new lil
wifey that I read about in the sassiety journals. You might happen to
remember, old bean, that there have been times when you were glad enough
to let poor fat old Clif slip you a feed and a place to sleep!”
“Oh, I know. You bet there have! Nobody was ever decenter to me; nobody.
Look. Where you staying? I’ll find out from my wife what dates we have
ahead, and telephone you to-morrow morning.”
“So you let the Old Woman keep the work-sheet for you, huh? Well, I
never butt into anybody’s business. I’m staying at the Berrington Hotel,
room 617--’member that, 617--and you might try and ’phone me before ten
to-morrow. Say, that’s one grand sweet song of a cutie you got on the
door here. What-cha-think? How’s chances on dragging her out to feed and
shake a hoof with Uncle Clif?”
As primly as the oldest, most staid scientist in the Institute, Martin
protested, “Oh, she belongs to a very nice family. I don’t think I
should try it. Really, I’d rather you didn’t.”
Clif’s gaze was sharp, for all its fattiness.
With excessive cordiality, with excessive applause when Clif remarked,
“You better go back to work and put some salt on a coupla bacteria’s
tails,” Martin guided him to the reception-room, safely past the girl
clerk, and to the elevator.
For a long time he sat in his office and was thoroughly wretched.
He had for years pictured Clif Clawson as another Terry Wickett. He saw
that Clif was as different from Terry as from Rippleton Holabird. Terry
was rough, he was surly, he was colloquial, he despised many fine and
gracious things, he offended many fine and gracious people, but these
acerbities made up the haircloth robe wherewith he defended a devotion
to such holy work as no cowled monk ever knew. But Clif--
“I’d do the world a service by killing that man!” Martin fretted.
“Phageotherapy at a yegg sanitarium! I stand him only because I’m too
much of a coward to risk his going around saying that ‘in the days of my
Success, I’ve gone back on my old friends.’ (Success! Puddling at work!
Dinners! Talking to idiotic women! Being furious because you weren’t
invited to the dinner to the Portuguese minister!) No. I’ll ’phone Clif
we can’t have him at the house.”
Over him came remembrance of Clif’s loyalty in the old barren days, and
Clif’s joy to share with him every pathetic gain.
“Why _should_ he understand my feeling about phage? Was his scheme any
worse than plenty of reputable drug-firms? How much was I righteously
offended, and how much was I sore because he didn’t recognize the high
social position of the rich Dr. Arrowsmith?”
He gave up the question, went home, explained almost frankly to Joyce
what her probable opinion of Clif would be, and contrived that Clif
should be invited to dinner with only the two of them.
“My dear Mart,” said Joyce, “why do you insult me by hinting that I’m
such a snob that I’ll be offended by racy slang, and by business ethics
very much like those of dear Roger’s grandpapa? Do you think I’ve never
ventured out of the drawing-room? I thought you’d seen me outside it! I
shall probably like your Clawson person very much indeed.”
The day after Martin had invited him to dinner, Clif telephoned to
Joyce:
“This Mrs. Arrowsmith? Well, say, this is old Clif.”
“I’m afraid I didn’t quite catch it.”
“Clif! Old Clif!”
“I’m frightfully sorry but-- Perhaps there’s a bad connection.”
“Why, it’s Mr. _Clawson_, that’s going to feed with you on--”
“Oh, of course. I _am_ so sorry.”
“Well, look: What I wanted to know is: Is this going to be just a homey
grub-grabbing or a real soirée? In other words, honey, shall I dress
natural or do I put on the soup-and-fish? Oh, I got ’em--swallow-tail
and the whole darn’ outfit!”
“I-- Do you mean-- Oh. Shall you dress for dinner? I think perhaps I
would.”
“Attaboy! I’ll be there, dolled up like a new saloon. I’ll show you
folks the cutest lil line of jeweled studs you ever laid eyes on. Well,
it’s been a great pleezhure to meet Mart’s Missus, and we will now close
with singing ‘Till We Meet Again’ or ‘Au Reservoir.’”
When Martin came home, Joyce faced him with, “Sweet, I can’t do it! The
man must be mad. Really, dear, you just take care of him and let me go
to bed. Besides: you two won’t want me--you’ll want to talk over old
times, and I’d only interfere. And with baby coming in two months now, I
ought to go to bed early.”
“Oh, Joy, Clif’d be awfully offended, and he’s always been so decent to
me and-- And you’ve often asked me about my cub days. Don’t you _want_,”
plaintively, “to hear about ’em?”
“Very well, dear. I’ll try to be a little sunbeam to him, but I warn you
I sha’n’t be a success.”
They worked themselves up to a belief that Clif would be raucous, would
drink too much, and slap Joyce on the back. But when he appeared for
dinner he was agonizingly polite and flowery--till he became slightly
drunk. When Martin said “damn,” Clif reproved him with, “Of course I’m
only a hick, but I don’t think a lady like the Princess here would like
you to cuss.”
And, “Well, I never expected a rube like young Mart to marry the real
bon-ton article.”
And, “Oh, maybe it didn’t cost something to furnish this dining-room,
oh, not a-tall!”
And, “Champagne, heh? Well, you’re certainly doing poor old Clif proud.
Your Majesty, just tell your High Dingbat to tell his valay to tell my
secretary the address of your bootlegger, will you?”
In his cups, though he severely retained his moral and elegant
vocabulary, Clif chronicled the jest of selling oil-wells unprovided
with oil and of escaping before the law closed in; the cleverness of
joining churches for the purpose of selling stock to the members; and
the edifying experience of assisting Dr. Benoni Carr to capture a rich
and senile widow for his sanitarium by promising to provide medical
consultation from the spirit-world.
Joyce was silent through it all, and so superbly polite that every one
was wretched.
Martin struggled to make a liaison between them, and he had no elevating
remarks about the strangeness of a man’s boasting of his own
crookedness, but he was coldly furious when Clif blundered:
“You said old Gottlieb was sort of down on his luck now.”
“Yes, he’s not very well.”
“Poor old coot. But I guess you’ve realized by now how foolish you were
when you used to fall for him like seven and a half brick. Honestly,
Lady Arrowsmith, this kid used to think Pa Gottlieb was the cat’s
pajamas--begging your pardon for the slanguageness.”
“What do you mean?” said Martin.
“Oh, I’m onto Gottlieb! Of course you know as well as I do that he
always was a self-advertiser, getting himself talked about by confidin’
to the whole _ops terrara_ what a strict scientist he was, and putting
on a lot of dog and emitting these wise cracks about philosophy and what
fierce guys the regular docs were. But what’s worse than-- Out in San
Diego I ran onto a fellow that used to be an instructor in botany in
Winnemac, and he told me that with all this antibody stuff of his,
Gottlieb never gave any credit to--well, he was some Russian that did
most of it before and Pa Gottlieb stole all his stuff.”
That in this charge against Gottlieb there was a hint of truth, that he
knew the great god to have been at times ungenerous, merely increased
the rage which was clenching Martin’s fist in his lap.
Three years before, he would have thrown something, but he was an
adaptable person. He had yielded to Joyce’s training in being quietly
instead of noisily disagreeable; and his only comment was “No, I think
you’re wrong, Clif. Gottlieb has carried the antibody work ’way beyond
all the others.”
Before the coffee and liqueurs had come into the drawing-room, Joyce
begged, at her prettiest, “Mr. Clawson, do you mind awfully if I slip up
to bed? I’m so frightfully glad to have had the opportunity of meeting
one of my husband’s oldest friends, but I’m not feeling very well, and I
do think I’d be wise to have some rest.”
“Madam the Princess, I noticed you were looking peeked.”
“Oh! Well-- Good night!”
Martin and Clif settled in large chairs in the drawing-room, and tried
to play at being old friends happy in meeting. They did not look at each
other.
After Clif had cursed a little and told three sound smutty stories, to
show that he had not been spoiled and that he had been elegant only to
delight Joyce, he flung:
“Huh! So that is that, as the Englishers remark. Well, I could see your
Old Lady didn’t cotton to me. She was just as chummy as an iceberg. But
gosh, I don’t mind. She’s going to have a kid, and of course women, all
of ’em, get cranky when they’re that way. But--”
He hiccuped, looked sage, and bolted his fifth cognac.
“But what I never could figure out-- Mind you, I’m not criticizing the
Old Lady. She’s as swell as they make ’em. But what I can’t understand
is how after living with Leora, who was the real thing, you can stand a
hoity-toity skirt like Joycey!”
Then Martin broke.
The misery of not being able to work, these months since Terry had gone,
had gnawed at him.
“Look here, Clif. I won’t have you discuss my wife. I’m sorry she
doesn’t please you, but I’m afraid that in this particular matter--”
Clif had risen, not too steadily, though his voice and his eyes were
resolute.
“All right. I figured out you were going to high-hat me. Of course I
haven’t got a rich wife to slip me money. I’m just a plain old hobo. I
don’t belong in a place like this. Not smooth enough to be a butler. You
are. All right. I wish you luck. And meanwhile you can go plumb to hell,
my young friend!”
Martin did not pursue him into the hall.
As he sat alone he groaned, “Thank Heaven, that operation’s over!”
He told himself that Clif was a crook, a fool, and a fat waster; he told
himself that Clif was a cynic without wisdom, a drunkard without charm,
and a philanthropist who was generous only because it larded his vanity.
But these admirable truths did not keep the operation from hurting any
more than it would have eased the removal of an appendix to be told
that it was a bad appendix, an appendix without delicacy or value.
He had loved Clif--did love him and always would. But he would never see
him again. Never!
The impertinence of that flabby blackguard to sneer at Gottlieb! His
boorishness! Life was too short for--
“But hang it--yes, Clif is a tough, but so am I. He’s a crook, but
wasn’t I a crook to fake my plague figures in St. Hubert--and the worse
crook because I got praise for it?”
He bobbed up to Joyce’s room. She was lying in her immense four-poster,
reading “Peter Whiffle.”
“Darling, it was all rather dreadful, wasn’t it!” she said. “He’s gone?”
“Yes.... He’s gone.... I’ve driven out the best friend I ever
had--practically. I let him go, let him go off feeling that he was a
rotter and a failure. It would have been decenter to have killed him.
Oh, why couldn’t you have been simple and jolly with him? You were so
confoundedly polite! He was uneasy and unnatural, and showed up worse
than he really is. He’s no tougher than--he’s a lot better than the
financiers who cover up their stuff by being suave.... Poor devil! I’ll
bet right now Clif’s tramping in the rain, saying, ‘The one man I ever
loved and tried to do things for has turned against me, now he’s--now he
has a lovely wife. What’s the use of ever being decent?’ he’s saying....
Why couldn’t you be simple, and chuck your highfalutin’ manners for
once?”
“See here! You disliked him quite as much as I did, and I will not have
you blame it on me! You’ve grown beyond him. You that are always blaring
about Facts--can’t you face the fact? For once, at least, it’s not my
fault. You may perhaps remember, my king of men, that I had the good
sense to suggest that I shouldn’t appear to-night; not meet him at all.”
“Oh--well--yes--gosh--but-- Oh, I suppose so. Well, anyway-- It’s over,
and that’s all there is to it.”
“Darling, I do understand how you feel. But isn’t it good it is over!
Kiss me good-night.”
“_But_”-- Martin said to himself, as he sat feeling naked and lost and
homeless, in the dressing-gown of gold dragon-flies on black silk which
she had bought for him in Paris--“but if it’d been Leora instead of
Joyce-- Leora would’ve known Clif was a crook, and she’d’ve accepted it
as a fact. (Talk about your facing facts!) She wouldn’t’ve insisted on
sitting as a judge. She wouldn’t’ve said, ‘This is different from me, so
it’s wrong.’ She’d’ve said, ‘This is different from me, so it’s
interesting.’ Leora--”
He had a sharp, terrifying vision of her, lying there coffinless, below
the mold in a garden on the Penrith Hills.
He came out of it to growl, “What was it Clif said? ‘You’re not her
husband--you’re her butler--you’re too smooth.’ He was right! The whole
point is: I’m not allowed to see who I want to. I’ve been so clever that
I’ve made myself the slave of Joyce and Holy Holabird.”
He was always going to, but he never did see Clif Clawson again.
II
It happened that both Joyce’s and Martin’s paternal grandfathers had
been named John, and John Arrowsmith they called their son. They did not
know it, but a certain John Arrowsmith, mariner of Devonport, had died
in the matter of the Spanish Armada, taking with him five valorous Dons.
Joyce suffered horribly, and renewed all of Martin’s love for her (he
did love pitifully this slim, brilliant girl).
“Death’s a better game than bridge--you have no partner to help you!”
she said, when she was grotesquely stretched on a chair of torture and
indignity; when before they would give her the anesthetic, her face was
green with agony.
John Arrowsmith was straight of back and straight of limb--ten good
pounds he weighed at birth--and he was gay of eye when he had ceased to
be a raw wrinkled grub and become a man-child. Joyce worshiped him, and
Martin was afraid of him, because he saw that this miniscule aristocrat,
this child born to the self-approval of riches, would some day
condescend to him.
Three months after child-bearing, Joyce was more brisk than ever about
putting and back-hand service and hats and Russian emigrés.
III
For science Joyce had great respect and no understanding. Often she
asked Martin to explain his work, but when he was glowing, making
diagrams with his thumb-nail on the tablecloth, she would interrupt him
with a gracious “Darling--do you mind--just a second-- Plinder, isn’t
there any more of the sherry?”
When she turned back to him, though her eyes were kind his enthusiasm
was gone.
She came to his laboratory, asked to see his flasks and tubes, and
begged him to bully her into understanding, but she never sat back
watching for silent hours.
Suddenly, in his bogged floundering in the laboratory, he touched solid
earth. He blundered into the effect of phage on the mutation of
bacterial species--very beautiful, very delicate--and after plodding
months when he had been a sane citizen, an almost good husband, an
excellent bridge-player, and a rotten workman, he knew again the
happiness of high taut insanity.
He wanted to work nights, every night. During his uninspired fumbling,
there had been nothing to hold him at the Institute after five, and
Joyce had become used to having him flee to her. Now he showed an
inconvenient ability to ignore engagements, to snap at delightful guests
who asked him to explain all about science, to forget even her and the
baby.
“I’ve _got_ to work evenings!” he said. “I can’t be regular and easy
about it when I’m caught by a big experiment, any more than you could be
regular and easy and polite when you were gestating the baby.”
“I know but-- Darling, you get so nervous when you’re working like this.
Heavens, I don’t care how much you offend people by missing
engagements--well, after all, I wish you wouldn’t, but I do know it may
be unavoidable. But when you make yourself so drawn and trembly, are you
gaining time in the long run? It’s just for your own sake. Oh, I have
it! Wait! You’ll see what a scientist I am! No, I won’t explain--not
yet!”
Joyce had wealth and energy. A week later, flushed, slim, gallant,
joyous, she said to him after dinner, “I’ve got a surprise for you!”
She led him to the unoccupied rooms over the garage, behind their house.
In that week, using a score of workmen from the most immaculate and
elaborate scientific supply-house in the country, she had created for
him the best bacteriological laboratory he had ever seen--white-tile
floor and enameled brick walls, ice-box and incubator, glassware and
stains and microscope, a perfect constant-temperature bath--and a
technician, trained in Lister and Rockefeller, who had his bedroom
behind the laboratory and who announced his readiness to serve Dr.
Arrowsmith day or night.
“There!” sang Joyce. “Now when you simply must work evenings, you won’t
have to go clear down to Liberty Street. You can duplicate your
cultures, or whatever you call ’em. If you’re bored at dinner--all
right! You can slip out here afterward, and work as late as ever you
want. Is-- Sweet, is it all right? Have I done it right? I tried so
hard-- I got the best men I could--”
While his lips were against hers he brooded, “To have done this for me!
And to be so humble!... And now, curse it, I’ll _never_ be able to get
away by myself!”
She so joyfully demanded his finding some fault that, to give her the
novel pleasure of being meek, he suggested that the centrifuge was
inadequate.
“You wait, my man!” she crowed.
Two evenings after, when they had returned from the opera, she led him
to the cement-floored garage beneath his new laboratory, and in a
corner, ready to be set up, was a second-hand but adequate centrifuge, a
most adequate centrifuge, the masterpiece of the great firm of
Berkeley-Saunders--in fact none other than Gladys, whose dismissal from
McGurk for her sluttish ways had stirred Martin and Terry to go out and
get bountifully drunk.
It was less easy for him, this time, to be grateful, but he worked at
it.
IV
Through both the economico-literary and the Rolls-Royce sections of
Joyce’s set the rumor panted that there was a new diversion in an
exhausted world--going out to Martin’s laboratory and watching him work,
and being ever so silent and reverent, except perhaps when Joyce
murmured, “Isn’t he adorable the way he teaches his darling bacteria to
say ‘Pretty Polly’!” or when Latham Ireland convulsed them by arguing
that scientists had no sense of humor, or Sammy de Lembre burst out in
his marvelous burlesque of jazz:
Oh, Mistah Back-sil-lil-us, don’t you gri-in at me;
You mi-cro-bi-o-log-ic cuss, I’m o-on-to thee.
When Mr. Dr. Arrowsmith’s done looked at de clues,
You’ll sit in jail a-singin’ dem Bac-ter-i-uh Blues.
Joyce’s cousin from Georgia sparkled, “Mart is so cute with all those
lil vases of his. But Ah can always get him so mad by tellin’ him the
trouble with _him_ is, he don’t go to church often enough!”
While Martin sought to concentrate.
They flocked from the house to his laboratory only once a week, which
was certainly not enough to disturb a resolute man--merely enough to
keep him constantly waiting for them.
When he sedately tried to explain this and that to Joyce, she said, “Did
we bother you this evening? But they do admire you so.”
He remarked, “Well,” and went to bed.
V
R. A. Hopburn, the eminent patent-lawyer, as he drove away from the
Arrowsmith-Lanyon mansion grunted at his wife:
“I don’t mind a host throwing the port at you, if he thinks you’re a
chump, but I do mind his being bored at your daring to express any
opinion whatever.... Didn’t he look silly, out in his idiotic
laboratory!... How the deuce do you suppose Joyce ever came to marry
him?”
“I can’t imagine.”
“I can only think of one reason. Of course she may--”
“Now please don’t be filthy!”
“Well, anyway-- She who might have picked any number of well-bred,
agreeable, intelligent chaps--and I _mean_ intelligent, because this
Arrowsmith person may know all about germs, but he doesn’t know a
symphony from a savory.... I don’t think I’m too fussy, but I don’t
quite see why we should go to a house where the host apparently enjoys
flatly contradicting you.... Poor devil, I’m really sorry for him;
probably he doesn’t even know when he’s being rude.”
“No. Perhaps. What hurts is to think of old Roger--so gay, so strong,
real Skull and Bones--and to have this abrupt Outsider from the tall
grass sitting in his chair, failing to appreciate his Pol Roger-- What
Joyce ever saw in him! Though he does have nice eyes and such funny
strong hands--”
VI
Joyce’s busyness was on his nerves. Why she was so busy it was hard to
ascertain; she had an excellent housekeeper, a noble butler, and two
nurses for the baby. But she often said that she was never allowed to
attain her one ambition: to sit and read.
Terry had once called her The Arranger, and though Martin resented it,
when he heard the telephone bell he groaned, “Oh, Lord, there’s The
Arranger--wants me to come to tea with some high-minded hen.”
When he sought to explain that he must be free from entanglements, she
suggested, “Are you such a weak, irresolute, _little_ man that the only
way you can keep concentrated is by running away? Are you afraid of the
big men who can do big work, and still stop and play?”
He was likely to turn abusive, particularly as to her definition of Big
Men, and when he became hot and vulgar, she turned _grande dame_, so
that he felt like an impertinent servant and was the more vulgar.
He was afraid of her then. He imagined fleeing to Leora, and the two of
them, frightened little people, comforting each other and hiding from
her in snug corners.
But often enough Joyce was his companion, seeking new amusements as
surprises for him, and in their son they had a binding pride. He sat
watching little John, rejoicing in his strength.
It was in early winter, after she had royally taken the baby South for a
fortnight, that Martin escaped for a week with Terry at Birdies’ Rest.
He found Terry tired and a little surly, after months of working
absolutely alone. He had constructed beside the home cabin a shanty for
laboratory, and a rough stable for the horses which he used in the
preparation of his sera. Terry did not, as once he would have, flare
into the details of his research, and not till evening, when they smoked
before the rough fireplace of the cabin, loafing in chairs made of
barrels cushioned with elk skin, could Martin coax him into confidences.
He had been compelled to give up much of his time to mere housework and
the production of the sera which paid his expenses. “If you’d only been
with me, I could have accomplished something.” But his quinine
derivative research had gone on solidly, and he did not regret leaving
McGurk. He had found it impossible to work with monkeys; they were too
expensive, and too fragile to stand the Vermont winter; but he had
contrived a method of using mice infected with pneumococcus and--
“Oh, what’s the use of my telling you this, Slim? You’re not interested,
or you’d have been up here at work with me, months ago. You’ve chosen
between Joyce and me. All right, but you can’t have both.”
Martin snarled, “I’m very sorry I intruded on you, Wickett,” and slammed
out of the cabin. Stumbling through the snow, blundering in darkness
against stumps, he knew the agony of his last hour, the hour of failure.
“I’ve lost Terry, now (though I won’t stand his impertinence!). I’ve
lost everybody, and I’ve never really had Joyce. I’m completely alone.
And I can only half work! I’m through! They’ll never let me get to work
again!”
Suddenly, without arguing it out, he knew that he was not going to give
up.
He floundered back to the cabin and burst in, crying, “You old grouch,
we got to stick together!”
Terry was as much moved as he; neither of them was far from tears; and
as they roughly patted each other’s shoulders they growled, “Fine pair
of fools, scrapping just because we’re tired!”
“I will come and work with you, somehow!” Martin swore. “I’ll get a
six-months’ leave from the Institute, and have Joyce stay at some hotel
near here, or do _some_thing. Gee! Back to real work.... _Work!_ ... Now
tell me: When I come up here, what d’you say we--”
They talked till dawn.